NATIONAL GRASSLANDS

The national grasslands were created in the
1930s, when the Great Plains was withered by a
long drought and the Great Depression had
left farm families destitute. President Franklin
Roosevelt approved a radical social program
to purchase submarginal Great Plains grasslands and resettle farm families into planned
cities and subsistence homestead villages. A
portion (3.8 million acres) of the 11.3 million
acres purchased became nineteen national
grasslands on June 20, 1960. Butte Valley National
Grassland in northern California was
added in 1991. All but three of the national
grasslands are located in the Great Plains,
from Texas and New Mexico to North Dakota.

In the 1920s scientists led by L. C. Gray examined
the use and abuse of private and public
lands in the West and studied land utilization
practices for production and soil conservation.
A 1929 federal act began the process
of removing marginal lands from cultivation,
leading to a national land utilization conference
in 1931. In 1933 President Herbert Hoover
proposed a government leasing program of
submarginal land, removing it from production,
and this was expanded by Roosevelt.

In December 1933 Roosevelt authorized $25
million in emergency relief funds to start the
process to buy 75 million acres. Three different
agencies began buying land and planning facilities
for resettling farm families, but they were
soon replaced by the Resettlement Administration,
headed by Rexford G. Tugwell. The
Resettlement Administration bought the land
through foreclosures, condemnations, and
voluntary purchases and constructed hundreds
of small homes in scattered subsistence
farmstead projects to resettle farm families.
This social experiment lasted until political
pressures forced Tugwell out after the 1936
election. The Farm Security Administration
then took over and, with authorization from
the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act, began
approving loans to tenants to buy farms and
continued federal land purchases. In all, 11.3
million acres were bought for an average of
$4.40 per acre in scattered land utilization
projects in eleven states.

From 1938 to 1953 the Soil Conservation Service
administered the lands, and large portions
were distributed to states, Indian reservations,
and other federal agencies. The Forest Service
took over in 1953 and had control of 5.5 million
acres by 1961, with 3.8 million designated as
national grasslands. The Plains grasslands
and their acreages are Comanche (435,319)
and Pawnee (193,060), Colorado; Cimarron
(108,175), Kansas; Oglala (94,480), Nebraska;
Kiowa (136,417), New Mexico; Cedar River
(6,717), Little Missouri (1,028,051), and Sheyenne
(70,268), North Dakota; Black Kettle
(31,286) and Rita Blanca (92,989), Oklahoma
and Texas; Buffalo Gap (595,538), Fort Pierre
(115,997), and Grand River (155,075), South
Dakota; Caddo (17,784), Lyndon B. Johnson
(20,309), and McClelland Creek (1,449), Texas;
and Thunder Basin (571,971), Wyoming.

Today, while livestock grazing permits to
private ranchers represent the largest use of
national grasslands, each also has a multiple
use management plan that includes public
recreation, wildlife habitat, soil conservation
and watershed protection, improved range
utilization techniques, and resource protection
during mineral operations. Oil and gas
leases bring in more than $30 million annually,
and grazing permits yield about $2.5
million. The combined annual budgets of the
grasslands is about $8.2 million. More than a
million people visit the grasslands annually,
using twenty-five campgrounds and ten picnic
areas.

Hurt, R. D. "The National Grasslands: Origin and Development
in the Dust Bowl." In The History of Soil and
Water Conservation, edited by Douglas Helms and Susan
L. Flader. Washington DC: Agricultural History Society,
1985.

West, Terry. "USDA Forest Service Management of
the National Grasslands." Agricultural History 64 (spring
1990): 86–98.